Bill Black — Is Politico or Third Way More Divorced from Reality?

Bill deftly trashes the Third Way New Democrats. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were as toxic as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher through their "triangulation," which amounted to moving right to capture the center.

New Economic Perspectives
Is Politico or Third Way More Divorced from Reality?
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

See also

The title below should read, "Why The Democrats Are Unable to Defend the u.s. From the 'Most Vicious' Republican Party in History."

Ralph Nader deconstructs the present by reviewing the history. This began decades ago, arguably under conservative Jimmy Carter.

The Intercept
Ralph Nader: The Democrats Are Unable to Defend the u.s. From the “Most Vicious” Republican Party in History
Jon Schwarz interviews Ralph Nader

Maggie Overfelt — The new generation of employees would take less pay for these job perks

Millennials work for the cash and good health insurance — just like everybody else. More than half of millennials (53 percent) say compensation is more important to a job offer than corporate mission (34 percent). And 91 percent of millennials say they are most attracted to a new job by salary and benefits. But there are some job perks that will make millennials consider working for less, by as much as 12 percent....

According to the survey, 77 percent of millennials would be willing to take a salary cut of at least 3 percent in exchange for long-term job security. Roughly 76 percent of millennials would take a pay cut of at least 3 percent to work for a company that offers flexible office hours, and 67 percent would be willing to take a pay cut of at least 3 percent to work at a
company that offers good mentorship opportunities.

I would take a salary cut of 6 percent to 12 percent to work for a firm that ...

• Offers long-term job security (38 percent of millennials)

• Offers flexible hours (37 percent)

• Offers good mentorship opportunities (30 percent)

• Is growing very rapidly (30 percent)

• Only employs extremely talented and smart people (26 percent) 

CNBC
The new generation of employees would take less pay for these job perks
Maggie Overfelt, special to CNBC.com

Tim Duy — Desperately Searching For A New Strategy

Interesting analysis. Tim Duy concludes with:

The dry statistics on trade aren’t working to counter Trump. They make for good policy at one level and terrible policy (and politics) at another. The aggregate gains are irrelevant to someone suffering a personal loss. Critics need to find an effective response to Trump. I don’t think we have it yet. And here is the hardest part: My sense is that Democrats will respond by offering a bigger safety net. But people don’t want a welfare check. They want a job. And this is what Trump, wrongly or rightly, offers.

Trump has at least correctly diagnosed the issues. Now comes the test of whether he can address them successfully. Krugman and the Democrats have lost the plot.

Tim Duy's Fed Watch

Desperately Searching For A New Strategy
Tim Duy

Very strong jobs report. Blew away all forecasts, including my own! The deficit's too small?

The jobs report was incredibly strong. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 268k, blowing away even the most bullish forecasts. The dollar has rallied to a six-month high.

Those MMT people who have been saying that "the deficit is too small" really have to stop now because they are totally discrediting themselves and making MMT look stupid.

We have been correct here at MNE all along, emphasizing top-line government spending as the key indicator.

I admit, however, as having taken a wrong turn recently on the dollar. I was bearish. Maybe it was all that, "making the euro harder to get" nonsense. People have to admit their mistakes or they have zero credibility as far as I am concerned.

What Happens When "Producers" Don't Need "Consumers"?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

How many citizens remember the definition of a tangent, from high school geometry?

Much has been written recently about automation disintermediating currently "secure" human jobs, and the supposedly dire threat that any and all newly invented tools now pose to human culture and humans themselves. Few stop to ponder the fact that we've been inventing labor-saving tools since the first twig was poked into a termite nest, long before the first flint chopper was knapped. New tools have always posed a transient challenge, followed by the freedom to turn our attention to other things.

Now, however, supposedly modern humans seem to be having problems TURNING THEIR ATTENTION to bigger and better things.

Uh, ... maybe OCD* is the problem, not tools or automation?

Consider (but please don't get overly side tracked on the specifics of) just one of many, many examples, hat tip to Shai Schechter ‏

"Truck driving most common job in 29/50 US states. What will happen when trucks don't need drivers.

Oh, I don't know. What did our ancestral primates (and their teeth) do, when gnawing raw meat from bones was replaced by cooked meat sliced with flint knives?

Can we please NOT descend into discussion of the trivia related to each & every such "what happens" question, and instead ponder what things will be like 2, 3 & 7 or more generations out? My persistent point is that our smorgasboard of new options worth exploring swamp each and every negative associated with population growth and our new inventions. I call this the Traveling Entrepreneur's Task, but it's also the Context Nomad's Task or the "SOCIAL-SPECIES DILEMMA," and it's at the heart of the utility & purpose of fiat currency, or denomination of ongoing (& expanding) Public Initiative. We've been doing that for ~3.5 billion years on planet Earth. Let's not lose track of that.

3 seconds of stopping to think produced this response.

I'd worry more about invention of the auto-consuming robot. What happens when "producers" don't need "consumers"? :(

Pun intended. But seriously, take our aversion to thinking .... PLEASE!

Is it too much to ask fellow citizens for, say, 60 seconds of silent, actual thought? What might THEY come up with, if asked to respond to this question?

Years ago, when visiting elementary schools for the NIH, to help reconsider science education, I used to ask this type of questions of kids. Up to 5th grade, kids everywhere had no problem demonstrating truly astounding imagination! You couldn't contain it! Sadly, you could palpably see the intellectual repression kicking in somewhere in 6th grade, in the form of repressed imagination regarding the future, replaced with too much slavery to "efficient performance" in the transient present. Much of the original imagination of student humans had - unimaginably - been contained and destroyed, reminiscent of the destruction of the once limitless Bison and cod fisheries of the Grand Banks.

NeoClassical Ideology & Collapse Of Human Imagination ... will that be our epithet?

For now, let's leave these dangling options for readers to explore on their own, unimpeded by any restrictions. The rising ranks of unemployed should have plenty of time to think, instead of just mindlessly watch tv.

Please notify me if any NeoClassical mouth-breathers re-discover the concept of infinite tangents, and then apply it to reconsideration of our instantaneous position on the evolutionary path of homo sapiens. Where do we go from here? Off on some random tangent?  Or do we THINK about the continuous, strenuous thinking required to keep within striking distance of our unpredictable survival path?  Well?

The murky images in my crystal ball imply submergence of a new sub-species of humans, destined for rapid extinction. Dumbo NeoClassicoSenseless, or the "DNCi" - disappearing from reality faster than a receding hairline, warbling their erble logic all the way. 

The sad part is how many passive homo sapiens may needlessly follow them off on some fixed tangent, & over the nominal cliffs the DNCi invent.

What's in YOUR crystal ball? Just the present view imposed by the DNCi, or endless new options worth exploring?

* Really, I'm surprised that adhering to NeoClassical Economics isn't on this list. 

    Or maybe it is, and we just don't notice? 

    Here's another thought:

     If variant wiring of many neurons within one central nervous system can produce OCD behavior in one individual, can variant policy wiring in public discourse produce OCD behavior in a nation's government? Since we're in charge of constantly rewiring both examples .... can't we fix or at least significantly mitigate both, with careful, persistent management, training and practice?  Say, isn't that called Democracy, and acting like a co-owner?

Dean Baker...perfect example of why the Progressive movement goes nowhere.

I'm having this crazy Twitter argument with Dean Baker. (See thread below.)

The guy is supposedly a progressive and I know he means well, but this is why the movement goes nowhere. These guys contradict themselves and end up arguing in support of the interests of the other side.

Baker wants to create jobs by boosting exports. Fine. Very admirable, but to do that you have to create demand for those exports. Lots of demand. How do you do that? Typically through currency devaluation or, wage suppression.

There's another way, too, and that is to literally "give" foreigners dollars so they can buy the goods that we produce. That's done by massive amounts of deficit spending targeted to the foreign sector. (Maybe we can rebuild all the infrastructure of the entire foreign sector, using their labor and resources.)

In the first approach, when you devalue your currency or, suppress wages, it's like a tax. You end getting less for more. You lose in real terms. So, yeah, you  might create demand for exports and jobs, however, those jobs leave people with the ability to afford less, not more, at least in the aggregate.

And Baker admits that. He says a weaker dollar is "negative for real wages." (So why is he pushing it?)

In the second approach, where you literally give money to foreigners via deficit spending isn't it jsut a better idea to deficit spend for the benefit of your country's own residents? Isn't it better  if they have the means to consume the fruits of their own labor? I think so.

So what, really, is Baker's plan? Create jobs by boosting exports, by creating demand, by weakening the currency, which is negative for real wages. Did we gain anything? NO.

There  you  have it: a leading figure of the Progressive movement giving really stupid advice. No wonder why the movement goes nowhere. Ironically he's probably against the TPP and other trade deals, yet in essense that's exactly what he's arguing FOR. We'd be outsourcing to cheap labor, but our own CHEAP LABOR. The standard of living of the worker goes down.

The best part of my Twitter discussion with him is when he gets testy and says this:

@mikenorman that' s fine that there are better ways, but it doesn't mean S**t, because we're not doing them.

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) May 9, 2015

He's crying now. Like a baby. "No one is listening to me and they're not doiong anything. Whaaaa...whaaaaa." So what does he do? Like all liberal-progressives he proposes inadequate or flawed ideas. Capitulates, basically. Grand bargains. And he ADMITS IT!

Conservatives would never do that.

When you have reasonable sounding people  like Dean Baker advocating for the very same things that big corporate advocates for every day, don't expect a lot of change. The other side must be laughing their asses off..

It is difficult to see how we get back to full employment and wage growth, without a lower trade deficit http://t.co/4iodfQQPTG

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) May 8, 2015

Higher dollar and resulting trade deficit slows job growth in April http://t.co/4iodfQQPTG

— Dean Baker (@DeanBaker13) May 8, 2015

Options for Europe: Euthanize the Bankster-Technocrats

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Bill Mitchell continues to expose the tragic comedy of blunders that we call the euro-zone.

The tragicomedy is so well exemplified by ex ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet that one has to explain his anti-sense in order for it to mesh with reality.

"It is an error [by bankers] to think that fiscal austerity [NOT] is a threat to growth and job creation."

At least the IMF is admitting that they would not do it again ... the same way.

Not sure how that leaves most Europeans feeling. Among killers, thugs, gangsters & sociopaths .... do out to touch bankers really seem like the lesser of multiple evils? Is that really the best these people can do? The perennial wonder is that Europe can build CERN and/or the European Space Station ... but they can't manage a simple spreadsheet called a sovereign currency system.

US & EU Both Pledge "1 billion" ($/euro) Loan Guarantees For Ukraine - While Pledging Nothing More For Their Own Electorates

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Loan Guarantees For Ukraine

This raises two sets of questions, about what we're doing domestically, and why, compared to what we're doing internationally, and why. Initial questions about why domestic US/EU electorates can't guarantee fiat investment in themselves, and instead submit to austerity ... is exceeded only by the sheer number & depth of half-truths, mis-conceptions and outright lies included in this article.

Example? Reduced tariffs go directly back to the exporter? No, that only reduces costs for the importing consumers (maybe only the intermediary merchants), and MAY increase the volume of exports being extracted from the "beneficiary" country. In reality, look for more EU/US firms to set up subsidiaries in the UK, and move yet more jobs from serfs in receiving countries to even lower-paid serfs in sending countries being looted. Can you say "internal devaluation?"

Where have we heard this story before?

Read on, & decide for yourself what these loan guarantees really imply.

There's a theme to the last 40 years? When electorates cede all governance to their merchant classes, they get what they claim was unpredictable ... less innovation, invention & leadership ... and more risk control, "management" and stagnation.

What, exactly, WOULD the Desired Outcome for national policy be, if we bothered to survey our actual citizens? Can we pick some worthwhile goals FOR OURSELVES, and go for them, instead of merely managing existing risks? Forget defense & offense, the best cultural evolution is an active Adaptive Rate?

Marshall Auerback, Stephanie Kelton and L. Randall Wray — A Plan for All the Detroits Out There

MMT to the rescue. Pass it on.

Note that this plan is based on job guarantee but not the MMT JG in that compensation would be indexed so that the real wage would remain constant against inflation.

New Economic Perspectives
A Plan for All the Detroits Out There
Marshall Auerback, Stephanie Kelton and L. Randall Wray

Wages Of Desperation? Or Systemic Self-Ignorance?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Capitalists ask why there's a shortage of serfs? Newly educated citizens ask why there are no real jobs? Uh, 'cuz there's no real democracy?

Words fail me. This is the culmination of a Western Education? The pinnacle of the Reformation and Renaissance?

Where's Luther? Where's Rousseau? Where's Tom Hill?  Any culture that isn't palpably aware of it's own, distributed outcomes ... isn't a functioning culture!

Dead Culture Walking. Dead Culture Staggering. Dead Culture Stumbling. Dead Culture Shooting It's Own Foot (for rebellion). [No, shooting the brain doesn't work much better. The real brain is all of us. Just start employing all of it.]

Shoulda OpenSourced the comms infrastructure far earlier! Suicide isn't success.



(Hat tip Vytautas Vakrina)

Mark Gongloff — Ken Fisher, Billionaire Forbes Writer, Attempts To Argue That The U.S. Needs Fewer Jobs

Despite all the cat calls he is getting, Ken Fisher is correct on this. The goal should be to eliminate working for a wage through technological innovation that increases productivity, eliminating repetitive work, rather than to create more of it because of some moral norm that says everyone needs to work to earn their keep, Genesis 3:19 notwithstanding. This is going to take a revision in the basic structure of the cultural paradigm. The faster we get to it, the better of we will be.

Of course, this means revising how we think about distributed prosperity. Clearly, wage income cannot remain paramount in such a system. This implies a rethinking of economics as it stands and the introduction of new economic paradigm along with the new cultural paradigm, and the development of new institutional arrangements to support it. Humanity is now in a position to begin contemplating this transition.

The Huffington Post
Ken Fisher, Billionaire Forbes Writer, Attempts To Argue That The U.S. Needs Fewer Jobs
Mark Gongloff

Stimulus bashing based on ignorance. The facts are the facts.

Stimulus bashing is big sport among Conservatives and anti-Obama, anti-government ideologues. The media, mostly led by Fox News, have distilled the main talking points down to empty sound bites that basically purport to say the stimulus didn’t work. You’ll hear things like “Obama spent a trillion dollars and it did nothing. All he did was put us more in debt.”

Well, I’ve already debunked that whole, “stimulus did nothing” fallacy with my chartbook, which showed exactly what happened to the economy. I examined a bunch of different metrics and they all showed the same thing: once the stimulus was enacted the severe downturn was immediately arrested and everything turned up. Everything. So those who say that the stimulus did nothing are just spouting pure ideological nonsense. Comments like those are totally hollow.

Some of the people on the right who are intellectually honest or not comfortable looking stupid, will refrain from saying the stimulus did nothing. Instead, they’ll take a different tack. They’ll simply say the results were weak. They’ll say something like, big deal, we got the weakest recovery on record and it “cost” us a trillion. How great is that?

Fair enough. In some respects the recovery was weak. The rebound in real GDP from the trough in 2009 was about 5% where on average, rebounds have been about 9% since the 1930s. If you strip out the powerful, New Deal and WWII spending booms, rebounds have been more like 7% from their troughs. So, yes, it was less, but not hugely less. And I guess you can argue that we still have a slow recovery in housing and unemployment rate remains stubbornly high, so that’s not something to brag about either.

Yet in many other respects the recovery has been impressive. Stock indices have doubled, household net worth jumped by $11 trillion and corporate profits have hit new record highs to name just a few things. The problem, however, is that is a lot of people haven’t participated in the good things because policies have favored profits, capital and the corporate sector, over workers and wage earners.

It’s not hard for people to discount the stimulus because they don’t know where all the spending went. I’m sure even a lot of economists don’t know. What was the breakdown of that spending? To begin with, let’s start with the total funds allocated, which, according to the government’s own numbers, was $840 bln. That equates to about 5% of GDP. It’s really not a very big number. Consider that we have run up a tab of around $2 trillion fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s more than twice what we spent on the stimulus yet we were facing the most severe economic collapse since the Great Depression.

Next, a lot of money that was spent was spent in the first year. After that the spending started to trail off. So we got a big boost initially and then things flattened out. Insofar as the breakdown of the numbers it’s all available at the Recovery.gov website. I will provide a summary here, but feel free to check these figures out in detail when you have time.

Out of the $840 bln, about 35% or, $290.7 bln was pure tax credits. It was not direct spending, per se. These tax credits included the first time homebuyer tax credit, Making Work Pay tax credit, earned income tax credit, as well as some tax incentives for businesses like accelerated depreciation. In other words, more than a third of the entire $840 bln stimulus went to tax credits, meaning that you had to have income or be eligible for those credits in order to get the benefit. Lots of people got nothing out of it at all. That wasn’t very smart.

The next portion of the stimulus, which amounted to $246 bln, went to contracts, grants and loans. This included spending on education, training, special education, rehabilitation services, as well as transportation (highways, rail) and infrastructure. A lot of other things were included, but the bulk of the money went for education, about $90 bln. In contrast, highway and infrastructure projects, which in many cases led to immediate job creation, had only $36.5 bln and $30.4 bln allocated, respectively. This is a pittance when you think about it. Our roads are crumbling, our bridges and tunnels are crumbling yet all we can muster is a pitiful 0.5% of GDP for repair.

The third and smallest tranche of the stimulus went to entitlements. That amounted to $238 bln for Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment insurance, family services, housing grants and agriculture. Out of this amount the largest chunk went to Medicaid grants to the states and the tab there was $95.2 bln.

That was it. That’s where all the stimulus money went. More than a third of it was for tax credits that most people didn’t get and the rest was divided up into a smattering of programs and projects that had only a limited effect on aggregate demand. Even so, it was enough to halt the economy’s slide and cause growth to return. And the growth remains still, thanks to the stimulus, which was, inarguably, the catalyst. Clearly lots more could have been spent. We could have been much more aggressive when it came to making the investments we needed like repairing the nation’s infrastructure, building schools and hiring teachers, financial aid to states, basic R&D, alternative energy and so on. That would have resulted in a much more powerful recovery and a significant drop in the jobless rate, but timidity and dogma kept us from doing that. Misinformed cries about the deficit from people who have turned out to be wrong on everything.

And now what are we doing? Instead of looking at these facts and saying, it worked and we ought to do it again, only bigger and bolder, we’re saying, “No! We must impose austerity on ourselves.” It’s sheer lunacy. The result will be a weak economy that lingers for years and years, creating more and more unemployment, poverty and social unrest. This is the true legacy we will pass along to our kids; not the debt.

Jobs for Europe Conference will be Streamed Live via the Internet.

Tom Hickey has already mentioned the conference, but it's worth repeating, and adding that the entire conference will supposedly be taped & online.

Bill Mitchell writes:

The Jobs for Europe Conference will be streamed live via the Internet. The various streams relate to the different rooms being used for sessions.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

GASPERI : http://webcast.ec.europa.eu/eutv/portal/jobs_europe060912

MANSHOLT: http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=0e9d935f7e3f2b502450c049ddbc7c92

JENKINS: http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=f24ad6f72d6cc4cb51464f2b29ab69d3

Friday, September 7, 2012

GASPERI: http://webcast.ec.europa.eu/eutv/portal/jobs_europe070912

MANSHOLT: http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=16fc18d787294ad5171100e33d05d4e2

JENKINS: http://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/index.php?es=2&sessionno=b848edae25876384476f8970b8491160

Apparently, the streams will “only be possible in Live streaming and Windows media player with Internet Explorer. Like its handling of the Eurozone crisis, it seems that the European Commission is once again “backing the wrong horse” (a reflection of my dislike for Windows and IE).

You will also be able to track live tweets will be sent from the plenary room, with the hash-tag: #Jobs4Europe.

My session on the Job Guarantee will be in the Mansholt Room on Thursday from 16:45 to 18:30

You can find a full program in English HERE.

Rick Bookstaber — Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots?

Whatever analogue there is to the Industrial Revolution, workers do not play much of a role in it. It is interesting that to this point much of the displacement from computers has been in the mid-level jobs, like bookkeepers. These medium skill jobs that focus on rote but quantitive tasks are the easiest for a computer to do. Replacing workers doing relatively unskilled, manual tasks is actually more difficult. But the rubicon is being crossed. For example, Meyakawa Manufacturingis shipping robots that can debone chickens at the rate of 1,500 per hour, replacing ten human workers. As one commentator put it, “if you can do that, you can do most anything.”

Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots?
Rick Bookstaber

Human beings are becoming expendable economically. What consequences will this have?

Are employment tax receipts warning of a softening job market?

Employment tax receipts to the Federal Gov't are now negative year-over-year for the first time since December. And weekly unemployment claims have risen for the past three weeks in a row. Tomorrow they're expecting a pretty strong jobs number. Do these data suggest a negative surprise?

The disturbing trend underneath the strong jobs report

Total employment taxes (witholding) collected by the Federal Government so far this year, are running about $8 billion above last year. On the surface this would appear to be a good sign and an indication of a stronger economy and job market, however, notice the trend, it's going down. This comes despite a stellar jobs number last Friday. It suggests that income earned on all these new jobs is not rising, but in fact falling. This seems to be corroborated by average hourly earnings, which on a year-over-year basis, hit the lowest level in 10 months in January.

Eric Schmidt's (blithe) answer to the jobs crisis

Yes, he acknowledged, many nations on Earth -- not least the United States -- are mired in a crisis of joblessness.

Technological advances such as automation on the factory floor have rendered millions of jobs obsolete, but they have also created millions of fresh ventures, while freeing workers toiling in antiquated industries to forge careers in higher-value pursuits. This is textbook creative destruction, the force celebrated by Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist who is the intellectual touchstone for Silicon Valley....

...No one ought to blame Google, or any tech company, for job destruction in a moral sense. Automation is as old as capitalism, the natural outgrowth of the human impulse to extract greater harvest with less effort while saving the cost of paying other people to do what one cannot or do not care to do oneself.Labor sidelined by technology is a story not confined to the wealthy world. For Americans, a discussion of lost textile jobs conjures thoughts of laid-off mill workers in the Carolinas, with production shipped to factories in China. But China has lost more jobs in the sector than any nation on Earth -- the direct result of automation.

All of that said, Schmidt too blithely dismissed a problem with no easy answers, one at the center of the populist ferment now seething from Cairo to Columbus. In the United States, he suggested, unemployment is predominantly the result of inadequate skills among the workforce, a problem that could be addressed with better education.

Governments have to do something that's hard," he said. "They have to go back and invest in human capital. There are plenty of companies in the U.S. and other countries I've visited that are very short of highly skilled workers...."

...Yet too few Americans have gained a slice of the spoils, leaving too few able to consume enough to propel the economy. That limits demand for all sorts of workers -- from parking-lot attendants and short-order cooks to tax accountants and architects.

Fixing that will require something that the fabulously wealthy executives now here wandering the snow and cocktail circuit are too prone to oppose: making the tax code more progressive, thus enabling more people to enjoy the wealth derived from innovation.

Read it at The Huffington Post
Eric Schmidt At Davos Praises Globalization, Dismisses Jobs Crisis

by Peter S. Goodman

Eric Schmidt should ask some unemployed "human capital" what it feels like to be creatively destroyed or to be busted down to a minimum wage job.

The scoop on the Keystone XL pipeline

The Oil Goes to China, the Permanent Jobs Go to Canada, We Get the Spills, and the World Gets Warmer

You’ll hear the GOP, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce make wild claims about the job creation potential of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Don’t be fooled. The pipeline company itself admits only “a few hundred permanent jobs” are created by Keystone XL.

The debate over whether Keystone XL creates jobs is a convenient diversion from something oil company backers don’t want you to know: this is an export pipeline to help them access foreign markets and bypass the United States. Oil companies will make bigger profits and oil prices for Americans will increase. That’s not a project that helps Americans. It’s a project that helps Big Oil.

Read it at Climate Progress
Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline is Not a Jobs Plan, But an Oil Export Plan
by Danielle Droitsch

In the end, real job creation won’t come from approving a foreign pipeline.  The evidence shows the future of job creation is in global clean energy markets.  And that the real purpose of this pipeline is to give tar sands producers access to international markets.

Such a deal.

Blah, blah, blah

If the U.S. is to recover from its doldrums, it seems, innovation will need to take center stage once again.

This is a lofty goal, and by all accounts, the summit's participants only got incrementally closer to it. Days were spent tossing out suggestions, not crafting and polishing a game plan. At times, the scene even recalled the leaderless potpourri of Occupy Wall Street, another group of earnest problem-solvers struggling to focus their energies to a single point. But the summit’s organizers say this week's events were less a self-contained process than a jumping-off point for something bigger.

"A lot of ideas are just stewing right now," said Dan Bierenbaum, a senior research associate at the Batten Institute at UVA's Darden School of Business, which arranged the summit.

This week was about "planting seeds," Bierenbaum told The Huffington Post....

In a few weeks, the group will finalize and publish a mission statement -- tentatively known as a Declaration of Innovation, in a nod to Thomas Jefferson’s most famous piece of writing.

After that, it’s not clear what will happen. A summit attendee told HuffPost that once the Declaration is finished, its authors -- a handful of participants from the original group who attended the summit -- will try to circulate it among politicians, federal agencies, business leaders and anyone else who might be interested in a road map for generating economic growth and a culture of creativity.

Read the rest, or don't bother, at The Huffington Post, Jefferson Innovation Summit: Business Leaders Brainstorm A New Era Of American Creativity

This is right out of a Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon.

Peter Schiff's job creation proposals

For the past three years Warren Mosler has been putting out a very rational and easily achievable plan to restore output and employment. His ideas are intelligent, cogent and based 100% on the operational realities of our monetary system. Warren's ideas would lead to an elimination of poverty and a restoration of prosperity both in America and abroad.

Has Warren been asked to testify before Congress?

No.

But Peter Schiff has. And here is what he said yesterday before the
House of Representatives Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending. Here were his proposals for job creation. (Totally serious.)

1. Fed should hike interest rates significantly
2. Balance the budget immediately with huge spending cuts
3. Abolish the minimum wage
4. Repeal all Federal workplace anti-discrimination laws
5. Repeal all laws governing workplace conditions, overtime, benefits, leave, medical benefits, etc.
6. Abolish unemployment benefits

Please read Schiff's entire testimony here.

I don't know about you, but this has just made me sick to my stomach. I am literally ill. In a country where we have thoughtful, educated, intelligent, rational people like Warren Mosler, our representatives in Congress prefer to listen to the ravings of this depraved idiot, Schiff.

We are surely doomed. Surely as the sun comes up.